Thanks, I always appreciate your thoughts, comments and upvote support! Great work on the progress on your epic legal case against Facebook/Google too - I always read your updates there.
It's actually Curangel and Newsflash that consistently put the biggest downvotes onto my posts. They have actually zeroed 8 of them in the last couple of weeks and nearly zeroed a few more. Smooth has put maybe 2 or 3 of his own in along the way too. Altleft is another one who often downvotes me heavily.
I personally feel a lot better about such downvotes if the person takes some time to engage in community connection and conversation, especially when the downvote is allegedly for 'difference of opinion'. I highly respect reasoned discussion and debate, so jumping for the downvote button feels like an avoidance of the whole purpose of social networks in favour of asserting some kind of dominance without even trying to demonstrate failing or mistake.
It's ironic that the downvotes are sometimes allegedly made due to a perceived poor ratio of upvotes to engagement, yet the downvoters themselves rarely, if ever, engage.
Thought I'd chime in a quick related story of my experience:
Newsflash downvoted an absolutely epic post written by myself recently. It got 427 upvotes and 225 comments. People loved it. It was doing great and then BAM, massive downvote on my undeniably quality content.
Was an interesting occurrence.
Shortly after, in an interesting twist of fate, the community disagreed with him and tipped me 5+ times the amount of the downvote, so even though my 6000-word post says it only earned 2.15 hive according it post-rewards, it actually earned almost 300, despite the random huge downvote.
Anyway, the whole experience felt kind of surreal, and I'm not sure what the takeaway is, but I figured it may contribute to the discussion. 🙏
(Side note: Curangel used to regularly curate, upvote, and feature me but stopped suddenly a few months back. Also intriguing. )
CURANGEL IS ONE OF THE LARGEST AND MOST ACTIVE DOWNVOTERS
That... is a surprisingly large number, lol, and I'm not familiar with who it's being proxied to, or why. Still, very interesting stats you're able to dig up, thanks for sharing and commenting. (I actually thought @ura-soul might weigh in here since we had related experiences :D) 🙏
I was informed by Pharesim that Curangel's money 70% belongs to the team that runs it. Azircon is responsible for downvoting, as I understand and has several million $ personally, as far as I know.
It's kind of sad to think that people can acquire such money and not think of anything more exciting to do than downvote posts.
Wow, thanks for sharing this. There's so many perspectives around on downvotes, and it can be tricky for newbies (like me) to make heads or tails of it. I really appreciate kind gestures from people like you keeping me informed. I imagine if someone is that well-off financially, their actions must be done out of... either boredom or passion, lol. 🙏
please consider reviewing your witness votes
each and every account has exactly 30 votes assigned
UNUSED witness votes are de facto votes for the oligarchs
I do my best to stick to my strengths (which is 'explaining things in-depth' through my content) and distance myself from most political stuff, but you're right, I should probably put more thought into my witness votes.
That said, I find the whole witness system convoluted and strange. In governmental politics, I at least have an idea what people 'stand for' or what 'side' I'm voting for, but with Hive Witnesses it's mostly just a bunch of semi-anonymous avatars, and I have no clue what they stand for, all I know is "were they nice to me or not", so that's basically all I have to go on unless I do a deep-dive on every witness. 🙏
Well look at how much time they've saved compared to myself running around in circle and getting nowhere. It's cute that you still expect people to tell you why they're downvoting you but when some do then you can't accept it.
Should I make a post calling out censorship when you downvoted a comment of mine down in one of your posts? Or should I stop commenting because it's not worth it anymore if the rewards get lowered from what I should've received?
I am a very direct person. If someone claims my posts are dangerous or scientifically inaccurate, they only need to identify how that is the case in a direct way. If they are correct, which can typically be verified through data, then I will correct my position and post differently. No-one that claims I am wrong on COVID19 has even attempted to do this to any degree whatsoever.
You have alluded to dangerous content in the comments in this post but not explained what you meant by that. You have also talked about autovoting but avoided most of the responses I sent your way on that topic. I have started this new post to try to progress the situation in a productive way - who knows, maybe you may find less autovotes as a result on Hive.
It's up to you. I personally don't really care if people downvote my comments in most cases because I can always start a new post of my own to draw attention to something that gets lost in comments. Nothing was in any way censored as a result of my tiny downvote, I doubt your comment was even rendered in a different position in the list.
People on Hive have been posting anti-covid conspiracies since it started, many are still ongoing. Who knows how many may have died due to not protecting themselves with a simple mask cause they've read shit like this on the internet. It's been trending on Hive constantly and most downvotes land late when the algo has pushed it down from trending due to age either way.
Certain authors don't deserve to get zero'd, like your case, but other "influencers" I've seen that bring 0 value to Hive in any way shape or form and constantly trend and earn a big pie from the rewardspool due to these autovote is what I'm against the most.
Hive isn't throwing people adrevenue money where it doesn't matter if they're faking their views, comments or following cause it's someone else paying for those ads, this is stake that people have either paid for or held onto long enough. It should go to those bringing some value back to Hive, not just willy nilly be thrown around - doesn't matter if you've bought the stake yourself, post rewards you create and curation you get from them aren't guaranteed until a post pays out. If you're constantly voting up stuff that others disagree with you're going to end up with less inflation.
All these discussions over downvotes, "censorship" and endless walls of texts could've easily been turned into working towards a layer 2 token that would want to reward this kind of content and these kind of influencers. Until then I'm going to try my best to protect the reward pool and make sure it goes to users who are putting in work and being active, whether or not they're big outside of Hive or in their Hive wallets.
Here's an easy example, do you think user https://peakd.com/@highimpactflix is bringing value to Hive? I checked all his other socials, not a single mention of Hive, no traffic coming in, no views on his 3speak, barely any engagement from himself or others on his posts yet he's getting $50+ on every post before the downvotes.
Now let's look at https://peakd.com/@gubbatv, a big influencer according to her website and what I've seen on her Twitch streams, consistent 2k+ viewers. Even though she may not be bringing in traffic directly to Hive, she's at least using the platform. Blogging, showing her artwork, using dapps (nftshowroom) and engaging.
Would you rather someone who's somehow landed themselves big autovotes got the stake or someone who is trying, not getting autovotes no matter what she posts and might eventually start promoting Hive than someone who's not even trying, not promoting Hive but 20+ other socials (even steemit and dlive) and posting controversial content on top of it all.
Yet Israel and other countries that have a vaccination rate of 70% to 90% and all have massive covid outbreaks and they all wear masks.
The "masks" you are thinking of simply don't work, unless it's a KN-95 mask. No government that I have heard of has reccomended everyone wear those, which proves they don't really care about our health.
Masks are also supposed to be changed every 20 to 30 minutes if it isn't the KN-95 mask in order to even do anything, when Doctors wear those blue masks in the ER they are not supposed to wear the cheap junky blue ones that don't actually filter anything for very long, they supposed to wear KN-95 masks that actually filter viruses.
All of the people wearing masks and other face coverings are totally unaware that they are not doing something that actually is helpful in any meaningful way. Oh, and by the way, I always wear a mask and I have my covid vaccine through moderna(I suffered side effects of heart pain for a month). After 20 to 30 minutes the standard blue mask becomes so saturated with a person's hot breathe that it stops going "through the mask" when breathing and starts to go out the sides, thus not stoping almost anything any longer and it needs to be changed. Nobody changes their masks. You don't, your family doesn't, nobody you know does.
A person who actually follows the science would wear a KN-95 masks and follow the protocols of cleaning it and reusing it. We actually have KN-95 masks and clean them regularly.
So should people downvote you for your anti-science stuff you just posted?
https://japantoday.com/category/features/health/explainer-what%27s-with-the-confusion-over-masks
https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/EPO/Pages/Wildfire%20Pages/N95-Respirators-FAQs.aspx
yep.
Thanks, yes, the mainstream narrative on the 'science' of COVID response is mostly absolute propaganda nonsense. It's really sad that so many people do no research of their own to learn who is really doing the lying. Masks are a topic that I rarely cover because it is one that so many have bought into and get so emotive over, yet the evidence is so overwhelming of the complete pointlessness of most masks, that if people continue to support their use then I know they don't do any real research... hence there isn't much point in me speaking with them (unless they do actually have an open mind and heart).
I can share numerous sources, including WHO and pretty much all studies prior to COVID that state that respiratory viral pandemics should not invoke mass mask wearing. It was a single study early on in COVID19 that claimed mask wearing was a good idea which was used to overturn decades of wisdom - it was later disproven, but the mask policies continue anyway. There are several high profile health ministers and policy makers on record stating that the masks do virtually nothing to protect people but that the policies are in place to try to curb people's anxiety and to give them a sense that they aren't powerless. This is such a perversion of reality I am almost lost for words. There is really only one explanation for this situation and it is that the policy makers are corrupt or evil. There's a long list of nutritional action people can take to drastically improve their chances with SARS CoV2, yet these were very rarely mentioned. These are one of the main, correct ways for people to feel empowered. The fact that they are rarely mentioned, even ridiculed and then replaced with a mask fantasy is literally criminal.